Weight of red cells made in a lifetime?

Question

B Abhishek asked:

What is the total weight of red corpuscles formed in a life time?

Answer

The average adult makes 200 billion red blood cells every single day. It’s about 2 ½ million every second, which is absolutely incredible. You've got about 20 to 30 trillion in your circulation and you have to replace that – about 1% of them - every single day.

You kill 1% of them and you make another 1% of them.

So, it should be fairly simple: you just take the number that get made every single day, you times it by how many days in a year - 365, you times that by 75 years in a lifetime, and then you times it by the weight of a red blood cell, and you get the answer.

How much does a red blood cell weigh? Well I had to look for that and it turns out, the weight of a red blood cell can change across your lifetime. I found a paper by Mischlinzski and Koshak who are from Gdansk Medical School and they tell me that the weight of a red blood cell is, on average, about 45 picograms - 45 x 10-12 grams - per cell.

So, if you times all those numbers together, you get 246,375 grams of red blood cells made in a lifetime, which is 246 kilograms or a quarter of a tonne, an absolutely staggering number, or weight, of red blood cells.

&nbsp| The Naked Scientists® and Naked Science® are registered trademarks created by Dr Chris Smith.

Information presented on this website is the opinion of the individual contributors and does not reflect the general views of the administrators, editors, moderators, sponsors, Cambridge University or the public at large.